Character Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Literature is a writer's secret life recorded in symbols.”

— Will Lavender

A writer is a human being. He has to live with a sense of honor.

— Irwin Shaw

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin,…

— Eudora Welty

while it is certainly the biographer's business to describe the foibles, passions and idiosyncrasies which make his subject a person, his work will be…

— Iris Origo

Novels–and memoirs–are perhaps the most comprehensive reports humans can deliver, of their private experiences, to other humans. In these terms there is only one…

— Tao Lin

Each character is an allegory for every aspect of human existence.

— Vanna Bonta

Forming characters! Whose? Our own or others? Both. And in that momentous fact lies the peril and Responsibility of our existence.

— Elihu Burritt

Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.

— Bernard Berenson

In fiction the story lives the more everyone comes to life, the more each character seems to exist in his or her own right.

— Brian Boyd

“Fictional characters exert a great deal of influence over our choices in love by representing inaccessible ideals to which we try to make others…

— Pierre Bayard

Legitimately produced, and truly inspired, fiction interprets humanity, informs the understanding, and quickens the affections. It reflects ourselves, warns us against prevailing social follies,…

— Henry Theodore Tuckerman

Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners,…

— Mary Wortley Montagu